News June

Moms push for healthier sex education

Four Winnipeg-area mothers are working to persuade the Manitoba government to implement a “healthier” sexual health curriculum in the schools. But one of the moms, Terry Swidinsky, is under no illusions that their campaign will succeed any time soon.

“I have to admit,” she told Today’s Family News, “most of the meetings we have are discouraging, but we’re not close to even thinking of giving up. This is something that we’re for years and years and years going to be into.”

A health care professional, Swidinsky was a member of the parents advisory group that met with the government in 2004 when it was developing its new health curriculum. But she and other like-minded parents quickly realized that the finished product contained a lot of incorrect information – including the common presumption that since most teens are certain to be sexually active, “sexual health” means teaching them how to have sex safely.

But if that “condom-based” mindset persists, Swidinsky predicted, it will only result in a repeat of past failures.

“We actually are in an STD [sexually transmitted disease] pandemic in Canada right now, especially in our adolescents,” she said. “And if what we’ve been doing for 20 years is not resulting in a decreasing trend, then what makes us think that more of the same is going to have any other effect?”

In addition, Swidinsky noted, some of the curriculum’s online resources are nothing more than “pornographic in nature.”

Also troubling to Swidinsky and the others – Cory Kress in Winnipeg and Dorraine Wachniak and Diane Duma in nearby Oakbank – is a new government-funded non-curricular item called the Little Black Book. It offers teens tips on condom use, STDs and the risks of hepatitis, smoking and excessive drinking. Yet sexual abstinence is mentioned only twice.

Source http://www.fotf.ca/